Leadership Team Lab

A customized leadership team development session for capable teams that want to work better together.

3-Hour Lab


A focused session designed around your team

Virtual or In Person


Designed for the way your team actually works

6–12 Leaders


Small enough for meaningful participation and honest conversation

Custom Pricing


Based on scope, format and organizational context

For leadership teams that know there is more potential in the room than they are currently accessing.

book a discovery call

When a capable team isn’t working as well as it could.

Sometimes there is no dramatic breakdown.

The people are smart. The strategy makes sense. Everyone is doing their job.

The team isn’t quite working together in the way it needs to.

People may have years of history with each other that shape current conversations. A new leader may have changed the dynamic. Some people may feel closer to the center of the team than others. Decisions get revisited. People hold something back in the meeting and talk about it afterward. Cross-functional work becomes harder than it should be.

Growth and change often make these patterns easier to see. The same can happen during restructuring, leadership transition or AI implementation, when people are being asked to work differently while carrying old assumptions and habits into the new environment.

The Leadership Team Lab creates focused time to look at those patterns together and try something different.

This can be useful when:

  • A new leader or leadership structure has changed the team dynamic.
  • History between people is affecting how they work together now.
  • Some voices carry more weight than others.
  • Decisions or disagreements keep resurfacing after meetings.
  • Growth, restructuring or AI adoption is asking the team to collaborate in new ways.
  • The team is functioning, but everyone knows it could function better.
Talk About Your Team

What happens in a Leadership Team Lab

Every Lab is designed around the team rather than delivered from a standard workshop deck.

I use structured conversation, creative exercises, reflection and real organizational issues to help people step outside familiar roles long enough to notice what is happening.

That might mean seeing an assumption the team has been treating as fact. Hearing something that normally stays outside the room. Recognizing who tends to lead, withdraw, defer or take over. Imagining what the team would need to do differently to succeed in its next phase.

The work can be playful. It can also surface things that matter.

The point is not to manufacture vulnerability or force people into uncomfortable disclosure. It is to create enough space for a capable group of people to see each other, and their own patterns, a little differently.

Then we turn what emerges into something the team can actually use.

Sponsor intake

We begin with a 45–60 minute conversation about the team, what has been happening, what is changing and what would make the Lab worthwhile.
This gives me enough context to understand the situation without turning the engagement into a lengthy assessment process.

We look at current pressures, major initiatives, known problems, and what is at stake.

Custom design

I design the session around what I learned.

The structure remains focused, but the exercises and questions may change depending on the team. One group may need to work with trust and history. Another may need to examine assumptions, decision-making or how people collaborate across functions.

The Leadership Team Lab

Over approximately three hours, the team works through a sequence designed to help people notice familiar patterns, explore what better could look like and experiment with different ways of working together.

We use real issues where it makes sense, while also creating enough distance from day-to-day work for people to think more freely.

By the end of the Lab, the team identifies a small number of shifts, agreements or practices it wants to carry into normal work.

Phase 4: Executive brief and follow-through

After the Lab, I provide a concise executive brief capturing the major themes that surfaced, the strengths I observed, patterns worth paying attention to and the commitments or practices the team wants to test.

One 60-minute integration session is available within 30 days to look at what happened once the team returned to real work.

If bringing the full team together again is impractical, I provide a structured follow-through exercise the team can use internally.

Leadership team working together at a table.

What your team leaves with

  • A better shared picture of the team:
    A clearer understanding of patterns, assumptions and dynamics that may be influencing how people work together.
  • Conversations that usually don’t happen:
    Space for people to name what they value, what they need and what may be getting in the way without turning the session into therapy or forced disclosure.
  • A small number of practical agreements:
    Specific changes the team wants to test in how it communicates, makes decisions, collaborates or handles tension.
  • An executive brief:
    A concise record of what surfaced, what matters and what the team agreed to carry forward.
  • A way to keep the work moving:
    Either a facilitated integration conversation or a structured exercise the team can use itself.
Book a discovery call

Leadership development during change

Teams rarely enter a major change as blank slates.

They bring existing relationships, informal power, assumptions about one another and established ways of making decisions.They bring existing relationships, informal power, assumptions about one another and established ways of making decisions.

AI implementation is a good example. A new tool may change roles, workflows and expectations very quickly, but the leadership team still has to decide how it will work through uncertainty together. Existing tensions or communication habits can become more consequential when people are being asked to adapt at the same time.

The Leadership Team Lab does not assess technical AI readiness. It helps the people leading the change examine whether the way they are working together will support what comes next.

The same principle applies to growth, restructuring, mergers and leadership transitions.

Who is the Leadership Team Lab for?

The Lab is designed primarily for intact leadership or cross-functional teams of around 6–12 people.

My sweet spot is organizations of roughly 50–300 people, often international or distributed. I also work with leadership teams inside larger organizations when there is a specific team or organizational challenge to address.

It works particularly well for teams that are already competent and functioning. They do not necessarily need fixing. They need a chance to step outside normal operating pressure, see what has become habitual and decide how they want to work together going forward.

Organizational Readiness Diagnostic or Leadership Team Lab?

Start with the Organizational Readiness Diagnostic when you are still trying to understand why execution is slowing or where the underlying problem sits.

Choose the Leadership Team Lab when the team itself is the place you want to work and people are ready to explore how they could work better together.

The Diagnostic asks: What is getting in the way?

The Lab asks: How do we want to work together differently?

Explore the Organizational Readiness Diagnostic

What People are Saying

Here is what happens when leadership teams stop performing and start doing the honest work of rebuilding their foundation.

  • We left the experience not only with sharper insights and actionable commitments, but also with a renewed sense of courage, collaboration, and shared vision. It’s a rare thing to walk away from a workshop with both practical tools and genuine inspiration. Heather made that possible.
    Andrea Melhorn
    Director of Operations, MO Studio

FAQ

Leadership team development is focused work that helps an intact leadership team improve how its members work together, rather than developing individual leaders separately.

In the Leadership Team Lab, that may include team dynamics, decision-making, trust, cross-functional collaboration, assumptions and the ways people respond to one another under pressure.

The Lab can be enjoyable and energizing, but the purpose goes beyond team building.

The activities are designed to help the team notice its own patterns, have useful conversations and experiment with different ways of working together. What emerges is connected back to the team’s real work.

No.

If you already know that you want to work with the leadership team’s relationships, dynamics or ways of working, you can start with the Lab.

The Diagnostic is more useful when it is still unclear what is causing execution problems or where intervention would be most valuable.

Yes, when the challenge is on the people and leadership side of implementation.

AI can change responsibilities, workflows and expectations quickly. The Lab can help a leadership team examine how it will communicate, make decisions, work through uncertainty and collaborate as those changes happen.

It is not a technical AI-readiness assessment.

Yes.

The Lab can be delivered virtually and works well with distributed teams because the session takes place in the same environment where much of their everyday collaboration already happens.

In-person sessions can take place onsite or as part of an offsite.

You receive a concise executive brief and one integration session that can be used within 30 days.

If bringing the team back together is difficult, I provide a structured exercise that can be run internally instead.

Pricing is customized based on the team, format, level of preparation and complexity of the engagement.

We establish the scope and price before the work begins.

Your team already has the people. What could change if they worked better together?

The Leadership Team Lab gives capable teams focused time to notice what has become habitual, have conversations that normal work rarely allows and try a few things differently.

Book a discovery call Start with the Organizational Readiness Diagnostic